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Christian Thomasius’s natural law works are usually interpreted as providing a philosophical theory for his positive public law treatises on church and constitutional law. This chapter argues to the contrary that Thomasius’s public law writings are founded not in his natural law but in positive imperial public law as this was received in the state of Brandenburg-Prussia. In this context, the central role of his natural law was as a program for the pedagogical formation of law students.

This chapter discusses the earliest teaching of post-grotian natural law by Henrik Weghorst and Christian Reitzer in Copenhagen in the decades around 1700. This teaching has often been presented as merely derivative of the ideas of Hugo Grotius or Samuel Pufendorf. In contrast, this chapter argues that Weghorst and Reitzer developed two very different, and antagonistic, forms of natural law, reflecting academic teaching in Kiel and in Halle. However, it also shows how Weghorst and Reitzer illustrate the common ground of much Lutheran natural law theorising in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Thus, for all their differences, both gave primacy to natural law and focused on duties, rather than rights, as constitutive of social and political life.

Derrida describes compassion as a “fundamental mode of living together”. In this essay it is contrasted with “stealth torture”, which leaves no visible traces and succeeds in systematically undermining compassion with the victim, in both the community of the perpetrator and of the victim. In Derrida's text, the Hebrew concept of Rachamim plays a decisive role in combination with “perhaps”. On the one hand “rachamim”, “compassion”, forms the plural of “rechem”, “womb”, while being attributed to male figures (including in Judaism and Islam, to God himself); on the other, the word “perhaps” determines Derrida's thought of the future. Torture assaults the “strangeness to oneself” that the “self” is by forcing the victim to betray what could be called compassion for oneself. Derrida's argument resonates with a powerful voice against torture of the early Enlightenment, Christian Thomasius, who identifies such self-betrayal as constitutive of torture. With the iconic image from Abu Ghraib which in intelligence circles is called “crucifixion”, we might be facing a return of the repressed foundation of the United States in a symbol of which a key aspect has been forgotten: That crucifixion was abhorred by the peoples of Antiquity and by Islam as the worst of executions.